"He doesn't want to always come out when
they're here. He wants to see the kids and visit his friend Willie and go the
cemetery..." she paused, "to see my mother."

My father did manual labor his whole life.
Standing, he took up almost the whole kitchen. My mother was a small woman with
thin auburn hair plastered to her head from the heat of the stove.
My father said in a low voice, "I ain't doing it." Then he turned and started to
walk out of the room.

With a wild swing of her arm her fist thumped
into the middle of my father's back. He stopped and turned around slow.

"Did you hear something?" he said, as
if waving off an insect.

My mother reared back her little fist like a
tomahawk and thumped my father in the chest.

He looked at her and cupped his ear as if
listening to something. "Was that a mosquito?"

My mother looked around. If she had had a gun,
my father would be dead. Instead, she swung at his face, leering down at
her, and hit him in the lip.

She hit him even after his lip was cut and the
blood came, each time him saying "Thas nuthing, I doan evun
feel," his speech blurred by his swollen lips.

Panting, she swung her arm and hit my
father on the shoulder bone. She cried out and pulled her hand to her stomach.

My father grabbed her.

"Whaddya du?" he slurred, and the
next minute they were at the sink running cold water over her hand, a wet paper
towel half stuffed in his mouth.

Then I thought I heard my mother laugh and she leaned
against my father, the sound of the water splashing in the sink.

He went to get my mother's father. They never
got along.

But sometimes when my parents were arguing my father
would weave and bob, and my mom would make a fist and holding it
the air, touch it
to
her lip.

David Bosnick
teaches eighth grade English in Binghamton, NY, where he lives with
his wife and son. He has published fiction and poetry in MSS,
The Rebel, Outlook, Mothering, The North Carolina
Review and numerous anthologies, including Roots
and Flowers (Henry Holt).